Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  The center is located off campus. Like many universities, Maryland forbids secret research on campus, but its transparency stops at the far side of its neatly trimmed lawns. “Classified research always occurs off campus … to ensure the integrity of sensitive work being done,” Crystal Brown, Maryland’s chief communications officer, told me. “Of course any research being done on campus upholds the spirit of academic freedom and an open environment.”

  Other universities have no such compunctions. “Classified research on campus, once highly controversial, is making a comeback,” VICE News reported in 2015. The National Security Agency in 2013 awarded $60 million to North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the largest research grant in the school’s history, to launch an on-campus laboratory for data analysis. “Due to the high degree of confidentiality required … specific funding, personnel numbers and facility details cannot be provided,” a university news release stated. “Physical access to the lab itself will be restricted to individuals who have been issued a security clearance by the U.S. government.”

  Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, based in the southwest Virginia town of Blacksburg, established a private nonprofit corporation in December 2009 to “perform classified and highly classified work” in intelligence, cybersecurity, and national security. Two years later, the university planted its flag in prime intelligence community turf. It opened a research center across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., in Ballston, an Arlington, Virginia, neighborhood brimming with CIA and Pentagon contractors. The center features facilities for “conducting sensitive research on behalf of the national security community.”

  Virginia Tech’s quest for buried treasure sparked George Washington University in Washington, D.C., to rethink its ban on research—on or off campus—that is “not compatible with open communication of knowledge.” Rather than be outdone in its own backyard by what one administrator belittled as a school from “out there in the middle of farm country,” GWU adopted a plan in 2013 to “explore modifying its policies to allow some faculty and staff members to engage in classified research.” It also envisions building a classified facility on the university’s science and technology campus in Ashburn, Virginia.

  “There is a lot of funding in this area, and we’re not competitive for that funding,” Leo Chalupa, GWU’s vice president for research, told the Baltimore Sun.

  Like many public universities across the country, the University of Wisconsin is searching for other income sources to offset a decline in state appropriations. After cutting its support per student by 20 percent from 2002–03 to 2012–13, Wisconsin allowed its university system to accept classified contracts, reversing restrictions dating back to campus protests against the Vietnam War. The university then joined with private companies to build a cybersecurity laboratory at a research park in Madison. Around the same time, its flagship Madison campus waived a cap on enrollment of out-of-state and international students, who pay higher tuition than in-state residents. Nobody seemed to notice that the combination of classified research and unlimited foreign enrollment amounted to an invitation for espionage.

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  U.S. INTELLIGENCE OFTEN meets informally with university higher-ups and gives presentations to faculty members about the espionage threat. Emails obtained through an open records request show such interactions at one public university, New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark, which has 11,325 graduate and undergraduate students. In February 2011, CIA director of science and technology Glenn Gaffney, an NJIT alumnus, visited administrators and board members there. “I am looking forward to continuing discussions on all of the topics we discussed including opportunities for students, faculty and researchers,” an NJIT engineering dean wrote to the CIA afterward.

  “Mr. Gaffney’s visit to his alma mater was a great opportunity for him to revisit the campus, participate in a recruiting event with students, and thank the school for what the Engineering Sciences program did to prepare him for what became a successful career at CIA,” a CIA spokesperson told me.

  The following month, an FBI agent had lunch with NJIT’s deans of engineering, computing sciences, and management at a private table at Don Pepe, a Portuguese restaurant near the bureau’s Newark offices. The agent advised the deans to beware of foreign scholars, especially from China.

  “There’s a lot of visiting professors, and the FBI’s concern is that a healthy percentage of them are intelligence agents,” said Robert English, then interim dean of management, who organized the lunch at the agent’s request. “They want to inform universities about potential agents coming over, and they want to warn faculty, if you’re doing any research, make sure it’s not on your hard drive when you go there.”

  Three years after the lunch at Don Pepe, the bureau hosted a career day at its Newark office for graduate students from the area’s universities. Although the FBI hires only U.S. citizens, it pressed NJIT for thirty students from its computer science program, which is almost entirely made up of foreigners, primarily from India and China. The FBI “pushed me a lot,” recalled James Geller, then the institute’s chairman of computer science. He did his best to meet the quota, sending a contingent of eighteen students, all of whom were international. At the FBI’s request, he provided their dates and places of birth and their passport numbers. “Attached please find all information on foreign nationals that has been supplied to me by NJIT CS [computer science] students who attended your event,” Geller emailed the FBI in June 2014. The FBI may have wanted to refer them as potential employees to other intelligence agencies or contractors, monitor their activities, use them as informants, or all of the above.

  “I was actually amazed they were willing to bring foreign students to their program,” Geller told me.

  If foreign students play ball, they may be rewarded. In 2014–15, FBI agents met twice with an Iranian graduate student in electrical engineering at the University of Nevada at Reno, asking him about Iran’s infrastructure and nuclear program. Coincidentally or not, the student came up a winner soon afterward in the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, known as the green-card lottery, granting him permanent U.S. residency. His odds of success were less than one in one hundred.

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  ACADEMIA WAS PRESENT at the CIA’s creation. Its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, founded in 1942, was “half cops-and-robbers and half faculty meeting,” according to McGeorge Bundy, an intelligence officer during World War II and later national security adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The OSS was largely an Ivy League bastion. It attracted thirteen Yale professors in its first year, along with forty-two students from the university’s class of 1943. A Yale assistant professor, under cover of acquiring manuscripts for the university library, became OSS chief in Istanbul.

  When the CIA was established in 1947, the Ivy influence carried over. Skip Walz, Yale crew coach from 1946 to 1950, doubled as a CIA recruiter, drawing a salary of ten thousand dollars a year from each employer. Every three weeks he supplied names of Yale athletes with the right academic and social credentials to a CIA agent whom he met at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington. The “classic CIA resume of the 1950s” was “Groton, Yale, Harvard Law.” In 1963, the Soviet Union expelled a Yale history professor, Frederick Barghoorn, whom it accused of spying for the CIA. Although the agency gradually expanded hiring from other universities, 26 percent of college graduates it employed during the Nixon administration had Ivy League degrees. It helped establish think tanks and research centers at several top universities, such as MIT’s Center for International Studies in 1952. The CIA “was the primary funding source for the Center’s first two years, and a sponsor of various research projects until 1966,” according to the center’s website.

  Almost from its inception, the CIA cultivated foreign students, recognizing their value as informants and future government officials in their homelands. It learned about them not only through their professors but also through the C
IA-funded National Student Association, the largest student group in the United States. With only 26,433 international students in the United States in 1950, about 3 percent of today’s total, the CIA relied on the association to identify potential informants both at home and abroad.

  The agency, which supported the student association as a noncommunist alternative to Soviet-backed student organizations, meddled in the association’s election of officers and sent its activists, including future feminist icon Gloria Steinem, to disrupt international youth festivals. “In the CIA, I finally found a group of people who understood how important it was to represent the diversity of our government’s ideas at Communist festivals,” Steinem told Newsweek in 1967. “If I had the choice, I would do it again.”

  National Student Association staff members reported to the CIA on “thousands of foreign students’ political tendencies, personality traits, and future aspirations.” The CIA helped establish associations in the United States of students from Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, as well as the Foreign Student Leadership Project, which enrolled students from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East for a year at an American university. With an assist from the CIA, the number of foreign students in the United States almost doubled from 1950 to 1960.

  Then it all unraveled. Ramparts, a monthly magazine that opposed the Vietnam War, reported in 1966 that a Michigan State University program to train South Vietnamese police had five CIA agents on its payroll. A year later, Ramparts revealed the CIA’s involvement in the National Student Association, stirring a national outcry. The Johnson administration responded by banning covert federal funding of “any of the nation’s educational or private voluntary organizations”—though not of their individual members or employees.

  Privately, Johnson saw the hand of world communism—namely, the Soviet Union and/or China—in both the Ramparts exposé and the antiwar protests, and ordered the CIA and FBI to prove it. Both agencies dug into the personal lives of Ramparts staff, and “eleven CIA officers grew long hair, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe.” FBI penetration and surveillance—including illegal wiretaps and warrantless searches—expanded under Nixon but failed to turn up evidence of foreign funding.

  The government’s crackdown on its campus critics, along with CIA blunders such as the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba, fractured the camaraderie between intelligence agencies and academe. In 1968 alone, there were seventy-seven instances of picketing, sit-ins, and other student protests against CIA recruiters. In 1977, a political science professor at Brooklyn College was denied tenure and promotion. The candidate had offended his colleagues by letting the CIA debrief him in a fifteen-minute telephone conversation after a research trip to Europe.

  The disaffection was mutual. Just as Ivy League graduates began having doubts about joining the CIA, so older alumni who devoted their careers to intelligence agencies bridled at the antiestablishment campus mood. “It is not true that universities rejected the intelligence community; the community rejected universities at least as early,” Yale historian Robin Winks wrote.

  Hostility between the intelligence services and universities peaked with the 1976 report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, usually known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho. In the most comprehensive investigation ever of U.S. intelligence agencies, the committee documented an appalling litany of abuses, some undertaken by presidential order and others rogue. The CIA, it found, had tested LSD and other drugs on prisoners and students; opened 215,820 letters passing through a New York City postal facility over two decades; and tried to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. The FBI, for its part, had harassed civil rights and anti–Vietnam War protesters by wiretapping them and smearing them in anonymous letters to parents, neighbors, and employers.

  The committee also exposed clandestine connections between the CIA and higher education. The agency was using “several hundred academics” at more than a hundred U.S. colleges for, among other purposes, “providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes,” typically without anyone else on campus being “aware of the CIA link.”

  Bowing to the CIA’s insistence on protecting its agents, the committee didn’t name the professors or the colleges where they taught. Typically, they helped with recruiting foreign students. A professor would invite an international student—often from a Soviet-bloc country, or perhaps Iran—to his office to get acquainted. Flattered by the attention, the student would have no clue he was being assessed as a potential CIA informant. The professor would then arrange for the student to meet a wealthy “friend” in publishing or investing. The friend would buy the student dinner and pay him generously for an essay about his country or his research specialty.

  Unaware he was being compromised, the grateful student would compose one well-compensated paper after another. By the time the professor’s friend admitted that he was a CIA agent, and asked him to spy, the student had little choice but to agree. He couldn’t report the overture to his own government, because his acceptance of CIA money would jeopardize his reputation in his homeland, if not his freedom.

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  MORTON HALPERIN KNEW about this deception from conversations with Church Committee staff and his own research. He found it “completely inappropriate” and intended to end it once and for all. The committee’s report showed him the way.

  From a bookshelf in his office at the Open Society Foundations in Washington, D.C., where he is a senior advisor, Halperin extracts the first volume of the Church Committee report. He opens the faded, thumb-worn paperback to a passage he had underlined forty years before: “The Committee believes that it is the responsibility of private institutions and particularly the American academic community to set the professional and ethical standards of its members.” That sentence sent him on a quest to persuade colleges to stand up to U.S. intelligence agencies and curb covert activity on their campuses. His mission would provoke an unprecedented confrontation between the CIA and the country’s most famous university. Its outcome would shape the relationship between U.S. intelligence and academia, and still has repercussions today.

  Halperin had Ivy League credentials as impeccable as any CIA recruit’s: a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a Yale doctorate, followed by six years on the Harvard faculty. A former White House wunderkind, who’d taken a top Pentagon post under President Lyndon Johnson before turning thirty and then joined the National Security Council staff under President Richard Nixon, Halperin had himself become a target of U.S. government covert operations, largely because of his misgivings about the Vietnam War. With the approval of his mentor, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser, the Nixon administration tapped Halperin’s home phone in 1969, suspecting him of leaking information about the secret bombing of Cambodia to reporters. It also placed him near the top of Nixon’s notorious “enemies list.”

  Halperin had also clashed with the CIA over censorship. The agency contended that The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974), on which Halperin had advised authors Victor Marchetti and John Marks, divulged classified information about technological methods for gathering intelligence. A federal judge ordered 168 deletions in the text, and at the CIA’s request imposed a gag order on Halperin in 1974, prohibiting him from divulging the excised material.

  As director of the Center for National Security Studies, a project of the American Civil Liberties Union, Halperin had lobbied Congress to create the Church Committee. He attended its hearings and testified before it, urging a ban on clandestine operations because they bypass congressional and public oversight and are incompatible with democratic values.

  Armed with the Church Committee’s recommendation, he approached Harvard and asked it to set rules for secret CIA activity on campus. He expected that any restrictions placed by the n
ation’s oldest and most prominent university on CIA activity would spread throughout academe.

  Harvard general counsel Daniel Steiner, whom Halperin contacted first, was sympathetic, and urged President Derek Bok to take up the issue. As it happened, Bok was already familiar with the Church Committee. Its chief counsel, Frederick A. O. (“Fritz”) Schwarz Jr., was a family friend and Bok’s former law student. Bok admired his political activism, especially on civil rights. As a third-year Harvard law student in 1960, Schwarz had organized a protest in Cambridge to support a sit-in by blacks at the lunch counter of a Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, that refused to serve them.

  “I can still remember walking into Harvard Square on a rainy day,” Bok said in a 2015 interview. “There in front of Woolworth’s were Schwarz and another student picketing over Woolworth’s refusal to serve Negroes in the South.”

  Bok had also met with Church Committee member Charles Mathias, a Republican senator from Maryland, and staff director William Miller, to discuss whether the committee should call for a federal law banning covert intelligence gathering on campus. Universities typically oppose any extension of federal power over academic decisions. Reflecting this view, Bok told Mathias and Miller at their meeting that colleges, not the government, should take the lead in curtailing covert operations. They agreed.

  “The integrity of the institutions required it,” Miller told me in 2015. “It could not be imposed from outside.”

  Bok appointed four Harvard sages to set standards as the Church Committee had advised. They included Steiner and Harvard law professor Archibald Cox, who had become famous in the 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre,” when President Nixon fired him as special prosecutor for the Watergate scandal.

  Steiner met with top CIA officials, including Cord Meyer Jr., who had overseen the agency’s hidden role in the National Student Association. Based on their discussions, Steiner wrote to Meyer, “I would conclude that the CIA feels it is appropriate to use, on a compensated or uncompensated basis, faculty members and administrators for operational purposes, including the gathering of intelligence as requested by the CIA, and as covert recruiters on campus.”